The first trailer for Bryan Singer‘s X-Men: Days of Future Pasthit the Internet yesterday, and there was a lot to take in. What better way to explore what the trailer has to offer than having the film’s director talk us through it?

The folks over at Empire cut up the trailer and asked Bryan Singer to add what details he could, without spoiling anything major, to the frames. You can see the entire set over at Empire’s page, but we’ve taken a look and cherry picked the best below. Let’s jump right in!

Is that Patrick Stewart‘s eye?

It’s his eyeball! laughs Singer. And the opening line is no accident. It’s him asking, what’s the last thing you remember? It’s a line from the movie, but in a way he’s also asking the audience. We’re about to go back into a familiar world – what’s the last thing you remember?

On Hugh Jackman as Wolverine’s older self:

The grey in the hair is something I took from X-Men Days Of Future Past, it’s a look in the comic, says Singer. I liked it, even though he hasn’t really aged physically it’s something that shows how tough things have gotten in the future, and brought that out in him and given him a little more world-weariness.

Singer explained what’s going on with Halle Berry‘s Storm:

She’s one of the last surviving X-Men in this post-apocalyptic world. She’s part of that with Wolverine and Charles and Magneto; they’re some of the last folk standing from the original X-Men. They’re at the spearhead of this mission, this last chance at saving the world. This is their only hope, their mission into time. Can you actually go back and affect time? Can you go back and change things or will time correct itself? Will history fight you back and is your destiny pre-determined or can you change it?

We get a glimpse of bearded Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) for a moment. They were close in X-Men: The Last Stand, have they grown closer? Singer confirmed it:

They are an item in the picture.

When asked about Anna Paquin’s Rogue, Singer said:

I don’t want to give away how she enters the movie at this point.

Is this Daniel Cudmore as Peter Rasputin, Colossus?

He may be his human form in that shot, I’m not sure. By that time in the sequence he may actually be metal but I have no visual effects done! laughs Singer. So for that shot you just get what’s on the set – a big, live, real explosion. No CGI yet. We’re in process on very elaborate effects but there’s really none of them done except for a couple of backdrops and a couple of shots I could slide in.

This is the scene where Mystique changes into some guy as she walks away from some incident.

This is Singer’s cinematographer, Newton Thomas Sigel, making a cool cameo.

Take a close look at his claws, those are bone, which means he hasn’t gone through the Weapon X program treatment yet. Singer says:

He doesn’t have his metal yet in 1973.

When I try to direct an actor, you always try to give them a sense of who they were as young men, who they were in their past lives, and in my imagination I always had that [with Charles and Erik]. I was able to introduce those notions in X-Men: First Class but to actually have them performing simultaneously on screen, that was a real thrill and a challenge.

When Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy come face to face at the end of the trailer:

It’s an abstract scene, without giving away its origin and how it happens, it’s a trippy scene, it has a bit of ’70s style in it and the entire scene involved a lot of interesting practical photography using mirrors and other things. It was fun to shoot, and it was great to get the two actors together.

I did get goosebumps, I’ve got a picture on my iPhone of the two of them talking to each other. These moments need to be photographed.

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